Can Genius Be Imitated? Copying the Masters in Tim’s Vermeer

Where does genius come from? Since the Romans first used the term to herald greatness, its source and definition have sustained debate, speculation, wonder, and no small amount of envy. It is a condition of inscrutable aloofness. In his 1847 essay “On the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle,” the Danish proto-existentialist Søren Kierkegaard described the former’s intrinsic potential—“the genius is born”—and pointed out that inspiration of this sort often gives rise to isolating modesty as well as power. “A genius,” he wrote, “lives within himself.”

Tim Jenison, a middle-aged tech entrepreneur in San Antonio, does not live within himself. In Penn Jillette and Teller’s new documentary, Tim’s Vermeer, he can instead be found on-screen pursuing a project that, to many people, may appear at once cretinous and bizarrely brilliant. Jenison cofounded the video-production company NewTek in the eighties, and has been called the “father of desktop video”; his interests and skills run toward color, fidelity, and resolution. In his late career, he has turned his attentions toward fine art. Jenison is captivated by the work of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer and believes he has discovered the old master’s secret. Over more than 1,800 days of intense extracurricular work, Jenison works to show that he—or, for that matter, anyone—can learn to paint like the genius of Delft.

For years, there have been suggestions that Vermeer, whose capacity to render light, color, and detail, was preternaturally exact, benefited from advances in Renaissance optics. Scholars like Philip Steadman, whose 2001 book Vermeer’s Camera roiled the art community, have proposed that he habitually painted from a camera obscura: an early device for projecting an image using a lens. This would explain his uncanny ability to color-match, for instance, and also why he used certain projection-friendly canvas dimensions.

But Jenison carries the idea further. By introducing an additional mirror into the camera-obscura setup—a small refractor on a movable stand that sits directly on his desk—he finds that projection becomes unnecessary. Instead, a painter can see a small portion of the desired scene directly over his painting hand, and he can directly match the painting he is making, line for line and color for color, to what appears in the mirror a few inches above. The normal nightmares of composition, like correctly rendering complex perspective and relative depth of field, melt away. To demonstrate the effectiveness of his technique, Jenison, who says he’s never painted before, feeds a photograph of his father-in-law through his mirrors and paints it by line- and color-matching on a canvas. The result is a perfectly proportioned, nearly photorealistic portrait.

Jenison thinks that Vermeer basically did the same. He says this would account for several puzzlingly photo-like qualities in the Delft master’s paintings: foregrounded objects that are more blurred than they would be to the human eye, uncannily exact proportions, and a treatment of light so precise it accounts for minuscule variations that the retina cannot process on its own. He is persuasive. And, endowed with an apostle’s confidence and zeal, he seeks to replicate, with no training, The Music Lesson, one of Vermeer’s most brilliant achievements.

The project is complex. Jenison spends months preparing an exact replica of the room that Vermeer painted in an empty warehouse, constructing windows to match the elegant Dutch decor, teaching himself to use a lathe to fashion furniture legs, and apparently sewing seventeenth-century garb from scratch. (The film is vague on how, exactly, he ends up with period-appropriate couture.) He enlists people like his college-age daughter to serve as models. (“We put her in the head clamp and positioned her just right!” Jenison enthuses of the arcane torture contraption he has rigged to keep his subjects still.) Progress is slow. But the results are encouraging. Jillette, who serves as the movie’s narrator and skeptical (though not very skeptical) foil, becomes persuaded when Jenison tracks down Steadman and the British artist David Hockney, both of whom accept the feasibility of his theory. “Was Vermeer a machine?” Steadman asks at one point—a startling idea, but one he likes. “There’s . . . this modern idea that art and technology must never meet,” Jenison explains. He hopes to show that meeting is, in fact, what they have always done.

Another piece of news in Tim’s Vermeer is that the boomers are now entering their hobbyist phase. The documentary is more journal than journalism; its style is idiosyncratic and indulgent, and its panel of corroborating experts—basically, Steadman, Hockney, and some artist friend of Jenison’s—is far from definitive. Grateful Dead–era facial hair abounds. Viewers are meant to regard Jenison as an enlightened and devoted amateur; but whether they do will probably depend on the extent to which watching an untrained late-career enthusiast of private wealth buttonhole Old World eminences with a private theory (at one point, he asks a favor of Queen Elizabeth) seems charming or cloying. If nothing else, Tim’s Vermeer manages to prove that optimistic solipsism is hardly an innovation of the Facebook generation.

The Music Lesson–inspired painting takes Jenison 130 days to finish. Along the way, he doubts his endurance, changes his camera-obscura setup, and almost inadvertently gasses himself to death with a space heater. When the work is done, he shows it to Steadman and Hockney. They are impressed, but they are not, it’s fair to say, astonished. What Jenison has ultimately produced is a compelling Vermeer knockoff. His Music Lesson is accurate and fantastically detailed, yet, even in video footage, it lacks the original’s magic, its polish and life. Vermeer may have been nothing more than a machine. But the ghost of genius was still, somehow, inside there, turning all the gears.